Dear Excolo, this has been a roller coaster of a day. Brace yourselves, dear friends; this is going to read like a novel.

First off, birthday greetings, which are always happily received. It's a bit ironic that the majority of them came from people here, most of whom I have not met face-to-face, in comparison with the ones that came in from those who I actually know here in Denver. They really, truly helped the day to go better.

I'm driving myself to distraction trying to get ready for Saturday. It isn't the fault of the people who are sponsoring it; they have been wonderfully communicative, and I have a really good feeling about how things will go. Perversely, this is exactly what's goading me to this frenzy; I want to make a good impression on them. Another show that I have inquired about, however, has not gotten back in contact with me, and I think that I'm going to put in another call to them tomorrow. That show is more established, and caters to a more monied crowd, but I'm less impressed with their coordinator. I have two other prospective events which I need to contact, and I have a sinking feeling that the person who does my casting has up and disappeared.

My mother called to wish me a happy birthday, and somehow managed to turn the conversation into an inquisition. I love her dearly, but we have communication problems that span back a lifetime. I know that she's concerned, and I know that she wants me to do well, but the way she expresses herself often leads to messages that are not just mixed, but completely scrambled.

For one thing, she is incredibly gung-ho, and doesn't seem to understand that her displays of cheerleader-ish behavior come across very, very badly. I'm knocking myself out on a daily basis, but she doesn't get to see that, since she's halfway across the country. As a result, her exhortations about the things that I could be doing come across as criticisms that I'm not actually doing enough.

Take today, for instance; I mentioned that I could, possibly, take my skills to someone else's shop. The reasons that I haven't are several; for one thing, the past two years have seen several established local jewelers go out of business. In one case, the firm had been around for over a century. The economic downturn hit them badly, and the uptick came too little, too late. It's sad, really, that they had to close their doors just as things are starting to recover, but I can understand. The lean years were very lean indeed, and the fact that my business is so very small worked in my favor. The point is, the other firms weren't hiring during the recession, and now there's something of a local glut of people with more experience that I have. If I had been working for one of those firms, I would be out of a job, and my own business would be further back on the growth curve. If I went out looking now, I would be in competition with people who have locally recognized names like Kortz Jewelers on their resumes, and bench jeweler certifications under their belts. I have neither of these to offer, so it stands to reason that the remaining companies would be less inclined to take a chance on me. And, as I have mentioned before, I got spoiled while working for my Old Goat. By the time he passed away, he had put an incredible amount of responsibility on my shoulders, coupled with an equal amount of trust, and I would likely not find that anywhere else. Before I could tell my mom any of this, however, she started in on how it would be a good idea, and I would probably have use of tools at another shop that I don't have in my own. Never mind the fact that an employer would not look very kindly about my using company tools for my own projects, I have holes in my knowledge base, and I know it. I even said so.

Her response was that, although I'm probably not going to go back to college at this point, there's nothing stopping me from taking art classes in the things I'm interested in learning.

I admit it; I don't have a degree. I was a few credit hours shy of my Associates when I had to drop out because of carpal tunnel syndrome. There were nights when I couldn't hold a pen to do my classwork. I am not proud of this, but I have tried to make up for the lack by doing things like reading chemistry and biology textbooks for fun, and I haven't given up on the dream of going back when my life is a bit more settled. What I'm sure that my mother meant to say was "I know that you have other priorities in your life right now." What I heard, however, was "I have become resigned to the fact that you are going to allow your brains to turn into porridge."

Yes, I could take metalworking courses; the ones offered by Metro State are well-regarded, and the campus is very close by. However, although I have holes in my skill set, I also am far beyond the 100-level classes. They focus on things like saw-pierced copper projects and making basic bezel set cabochon pieces. I have the design of a $15,000 diamond ring under my belt, and I regularly construct rings that have bridge mountings and cathedral shoulders. When I pointed out that taking college courses for jewelry design would mean interviewing with the professors so that they could figure out where to put me, she pointed out that they have telephones. I deferred on that idea, and pointed out that the Colorado Metalsmith's Association has skill-specific seminars; she immediately began grilling me as to what they offer, how much the membership is, and how much the courses cost. And she offered to pay for a year's membership for me.

I should be jumping for joy at this, right? Except for the part in which I'm not.

As of this moment, I have been officially 39 years old for about 3 hours (I was born very late on March 7th), but I feel as though I'm being treated like I'm a third that age. Honestly, this is the sort of thing that you would do with a not-terribly-motivated teenager; apply a very big stick, then dangle the carrot. I'm not that teenager anymore, and I resent being bullied as though I am.

She has always been like this; gung-ho beyond the bounds of reason. She owned her first business before she was eighteen. She owned her first home before she was 25. One semester, she attended college full time, worked a full-time job, and a part-time one as well. (Granted, she only did that for the one semester, but she did it.) She lives as though she has a ram jet powering her, and she holds the people around her to the same standard. This has caused considerable friction in the past; one year she went to my school and asked to see my history of academic achievement test scores. I consistently placed in the top 1st to 5th percentile for verbal and reading comprehension, and in the top 20th to 25th percentile in math. This means that, at my worst, I was doing better than 75% of my peers. Most parents would be delighted at this, but she took me aside and told me that it didn't look as though I had achieved all that much. What she meant was that she saw room for me to pull up my math scores, and if I had been able to earlier overcome the combination of inadequate teaching and math-phobia instilled by my father, I probably could have done just that. That wasn't what she said though, and she was befuddled when I took her pronouncement badly.

Now, she harps on my business, and the notion that I'm not doing "enough". Pray tell; what defines "enough"? I'm not making a fortune, but I'm making enough to keep going. I'm steadily increasing my income every year. I'm not a Name, but I'm becoming well-regarded locally. I have had people at the Cafe where I exhibit -- people who are not rolling in riches, mind you -- eat ramen noodles for a week so that they can afford to commission a special piece from me as a gift for someone else, and that says more about how my work is regarded than the glossiest ad campaign. I'm my own bookkeeper, my own advertising agency, my own promoter, my own designer, and my own manufacturer. What I do is physically exhausting; I spend what feels like hours on end hunched over, blowtorch in hand, not able to move around because I need heat in one exact spot for a soldering operation. At the end of long day, every muscle in my body is knotted or twitching, and sometimes both. How is this not "enough"?

I really feel that a lot of this can be laid at my father's feet. Although she has tried to purge the damage that he did from our relationship, I can see its shadow. My father was more of an artiste than an artisan, and certainly didn't have a lot in the way of goals or drive. It's no mistake that both he and my mother used the same insult on me when I was younger; whenever I did something that one of them didn't like, they would accuse me of acting "just like" the other one, and I had no illusions that this was meant as a compliment. If I point this out to her, it will probably cause her to back off quickly enough, but I fear that it might also do some damage in the process.

Now, on top of all this, D. -- my dear Grad Student -- got a bundle of mixed news from his PhD applications. First off was a very polite and properly regretful rejection letter from UCLA, which was really the wild card application. They would have had to throw a lot of money at him to compensate for the cost of living increase; and there's that fact that I would be illegally bringing a ferret into California. Yes, domestic ferrets are illegal in California, and if I get started on the idiocy of that particular bit of legislation, I'll be typing all night. So, while that letter made the overall decision making process easier in a way, it's still bittersweet; UCLA is a good school, Los Angeles is one of the world's great cities, and they're doing research there that really interests him.

The second bit of news was an acceptance letter from U of M. However, it's a backhanded acceptance, as it comes with no funding whatsoever. No TA offers, no RA offers, and no tuition assistance. U of M had a record number of internal applicants this year, and didn't get two major grants because NIH funding has been slashed by the Bush administration.

Just to bring this into perspective: Minnesota makes it incredibly hard for a student to establish residency, largely because they have a very good social safety net for residents. You have to work in the state, and student positions do not count. The legislation was obviously written with undergrads in mind, and didn't take the needs and restrictions of graduate students into account. This means that, for the past two years, he has been living there, paying taxes there, and voting there, but he would have to pay out-of-state tuition -- at some $13,000 per semester -- if he stayed at U of M. There is simply no way that we can afford that.

The realization hit him this afternoon as he was leaving campus: we won't be able to start our lives in Minneapolis unless something miraculous happens. We won't be able to live there, possibly for a very long time. I love the city. He loves the city. We have friends there; good friends. After all of the trauma with selling the condo, moving across the country, leaving Home behind, our developing and then maintaining our relationship, and his doing so with a badly broken leg at the start of it ...it comes to this. A slightly more polite version of "Oh, okay. Whatever" from the university.

It's not like the rejection from Johns Hopkins, but it is going to take a while for him to process it.

From CU-Denver, there is still an increasingly uncomfortable silence.

Now, when he called this afternoon, we had already been going back and forth about these things on his blog (the joys of the modern relationship) for much of the day. He even apologized during the text exchange about this not being a very fun birthday present. I told him that he had nothing for which to apologize; however, the collected faculty and staff of both U of M and the CU-HSC need to prostrate themselves before me en masse and beg my dubious mercy. Of course, by the time he called, we were both in a Mood, and tandem whining is not best done over 900 miles of copper and fiber optic cable. I was fresh from a verbal fencing match, he was distracted and obsessive, and neither of us really got the comfort that we needed from the other. He apologized for that in a later e-mail; he really just wanted to wish me a happy birthday and see how I was doing. Luckily, this weekend we will be able to hash some of this out together, and not over various cable systems, since he's driving down for Spring Break. Right now, though, we are both bone-weary and more than a little numb.

Can I just go back to being 38 and get a do-over next week?